The Avalanche

It was half-past eleven when Ruyler and Spaulding, masked and wearing colored silk dominoes, entered the great gates of the Thornton estate in San Mateo, the detective merely displaying something in his palm to the stern guardians that kept the county rabble at bay.

The mob stood off rather grumblingly, for they would have liked to get closer to that gorgeous mass of light they could merely glimpse through the great oaks of the lower part of the estate, and to the music so seductive in the distance.

They were not a rabble to excite pity, by any means.  A few ragged tramps had joined the crowd, possibly a few pickpockets from the city, watching their opportunity to slip in behind one of the automobiles that brought the guests from the station or from the estates up and down the valley.  They were, for the most part, trades-people from the little towns—­San Mateo, Redwood City—­or the wives of the proletariat—­or the servants of the neighboring estates.  But, although, they grumbled and envied, they made no attempt to force their way in; it was only the light-fingered gentry the police at the great iron gates were on the lookout for.

Ruyler, if his mind had been less harrowed with the looming and possibly dire climax of his own secret drama, would have laughed aloud at this melodramatic entrance to the grounds of one of his most intimate friends.  He and Spaulding had walked from the train, but they were not detained as long as a gay party of young people from Atherton, who teased the police by refusing to present their cards or lift their masks.  Ruyler knew them all, but they finally sped past him without even a glance of contempt for mere foot passengers, even though they looked like a couple of dodging conspirators.

He had met Spaulding at the station in San Francisco, and private conversation on the crowded train had been impossible.  When they had walked a few yards along the wide avenue, as brilliant as day with its thousands of colored lights concealed in the astonished pines, Ruyler sat deliberately down upon a bench and motioned the detective to take the seat beside him.

“It is time you gave me some sort of a hint,” he said.  “After all, it is my affair—­”

“I know, but as I said, you might not approve my methods, and if you balk, all is up.  We’ve got the chance of our lives.  It’s now or never.”

“I do not at all like the idea that you may be forcing me into a position where I may find myself doing something I shall be ashamed of for the rest of my life.”

Ruyler’s tone was haughty.  He did not relish being led round by the nose, and his nerves were jumping.

“Now!  Now!” said Spaulding soothingly, as he lit a cigar.  “When you hire a detective you hire him to do things you wouldn’t do yourself; and if you won’t give him the little help he’s got to have from you or quit, what’s the use of hiring him at all?

“I know perfectly well that nothing but your own eyes would convince you of what it’s up to me to prove—­to say nothing of the fact that I count on your entrance at the last minute to put an end to the whole bad business.  For it is a bad business—­believe me.  But not a word of that now.  You couldn’t pry open my lips with a five dollar Havana.”

“Well—­you say you had a talk with Madame Delano to-day.  Surely you can tell me some of the things you have discovered.”

“A whole lot.  I’ve been waiting for the chance.  Not that I got anything out of her.  She’s one grand bluffer and no mistake.  I take off my hat to her.  When I told her that I could lay hands on the proof that she was Marie Garnett—­although Jim had married her in his home town under his own name—­and that she’d gone home to France with the kid when it was five, taking the cue from her friend, Mrs. Lawton, and sending word back she was dead—­”

“You were equally sure a few days ago that she was Mrs. Lawton—­”

“That was just my constructive imagination on the loose.  It was a lovely theory, and I sort of hung on to it.  But I had no real data to go on.  Now I’ve got the evidence that Jim Garnett died two months before the fire burnt up pretty nearly all the records, and that his body was shipped back to Holbrook Centre to be buried in the family plot.  You see, he was sick for some time out on Pacific Avenue, and his death was registered where the fire didn’t go—­”

“But what put you on?” asked Ruyler impatiently.  “I should almost rather it had been any one else.  He seems to have been about as bad a lot as even this town ever turned out.”

“He was, all right, and his father before him, although they came from mighty fine folks back east.  His father came out in ’49 with the gold rush crowd, panned out a good pile, and then, liking the life—­San Francisco was a gay little burg those days—­opened one of the crack gambling houses down on the Old Plaza.  Plate glass windows you could look through from outside if you thought it best to stay out, and see hundreds of men playing at tables where the gold pieces—­often slugs—­were piled as high as their noses, and hundreds more walking up and down the aisles either waiting for a chance to sit, or hoping to appease their hunger with the sight of so much gold.  They didn’t try any funny business, for every gambler had a six-shooter in his hip pocket, and sometimes on the table beside him.

“Sometimes men would walk out and shoot themselves on the sidewalk in front of the windows, and not a soul inside would so much as look up.  Well, Delano the first had a short life but a merry one.  He couldn’t keep away from the tables himself, and first thing he knew he was broke, sold up.  He went back to the mines, but his luck had gone, and his wife—­she had followed him out here—­persuaded him to go back home and live in the old house, on a little income she had; and he bored all the neighbors to death for a few years about ‘early days in California’ until he dropped off.  Her name was Mary Garnett.

“That’s what put me on—­the G. in the middle of the name of the man Madame Delano married.  I telegraphed to Holbrook Centre to find out what his middle name was, and after that it was easy.  I also found out that he was born in California, and I guess that old wild life was in his blood.  He stood Holbrook Centre until he was sixteen, and then homed back and took up the trade he just naturally had inherited.

“I figger out that he didn’t tell his wife the truth when he married her back there, not until he was on the train pretty close to S.F., and then he told her because he couldn’t help himself.  She couldn’t help herself, either, and besides she was in love with him.  He was a handsome, distinguished lookin’ chap, and he kept right on bein’ a fascinator as long as he lived.

“I guess that’s the reason she left him in the end.  She stood for the gambling joint, and, although she had a cool sarcastic way with her that kept the men who fell for her at a distance, she was a good decoy, and she looked a regular queen at the head of the green table.  She was chummy with Jim’s intimates, two of whom were D.V.  Bimmer and ’Gene Bisbee, but even ’Gene didn’t dare take any liberties with her.

“It was natural that a woman brought up as she had been should have kept her child out of it, and I figger that she got disgusted with Jim and came to the full sense of her duty to the poor kid about the same time.  But she didn’t go until Jim settled so much a month on her through old Lawton—­who used to amuse himself at Garnett’s a good deal in those days, and who was one of her best friends.

“Well, she also got Garnett to make a curious sort of a will, leaving his money to James Lawton, to ‘dispose of as agreed upon.’  She had a thrifty business head, had that French dame, and she had made him buy property when he was flush, and put it in her name, although she gave a written agreement never to sell out as long as he lived.

“He agreed to let her go because he was dippy about another skirt at the time, and, besides, she played on his family pride—­lineal descendant of the Delanos, Garnetts, and so forth.  He’d never seen the kid after it was taken to the convent, but I guess he liked the idea, all right, of its being brought up wearing the old name, and gettin’ rid of Marie at the same time.

“She was too canny to leave him a loophole for divorce, even in California; but I guess that didn’t worry him much.

“If the earthquake and fire hadn’t come so soon after the will was probated there might have been a lot of speculation about it, among men, at least.  Those old gossips in the Club windows would soon have been putting two and two together; but the calamity that burnt up all the Club windows, just swept it clean out of their heads.

“I figger out that old Lawton continued to pay Madame Delano the income she’d been havin’ both from Jim and her properties, out of his own pocket, until the city was rebuilt and he could settle the estate.  He had to borrow the money to rebuild the houses Jim had put up on his wife’s property, and when things got to a certain pass he wrote Madame D. to come along and take over her property.  She’ll be good and rich one of these days, when all the mortgages are paid off and Lawton paid back, but it was wise for her to stay on the job.  Lawton is dead straight, but his partner is sowing wild oats in his old age—­good old S.F. style, and I guess it ain’t wise to tempt him too far.  Get me?”

“It’s atrocious!”

“Oh, not nearly so bad as it might be.  Just think, if it had been Gabrielle, or Pauline-Marie, or even Mrs. Lawton.  That’s the worst kind of bad blood for a woman to inherit.  Marie Garnett hung on like grim death to what the grand society you move in pretends to value most, and the Lord knows she’ll never lose it now.

“Nor need there be any scandal to drive your family to suicide.  The thing to do is to hustle Madame Delano out of San Francisco.  She’ll go, all right, with you to look after her interests.  She don’t fancy being recognized and blackmailed, or I miss my guess.  You may have to pay Bisbee something, but D. V.’s not that sort, and I don’t think anybody else is on.  If they’ve suspected they’ll soon forget it when the old lady disappears from the Palace Hotel.  Gee, but she has a nerve.”

“She is an old cynic.  If she had any snobbery in her she’d be here to-night, rubbing elbows with the women who never knew of her existence twenty years ago, although their husbands did.  It has satisfied her ironic French soul to sit in the court of the Palace Hotel day after day and defy San Francisco to recognize Marie Garnett in the obese Madame Delano, whose daughter is one of the great ladies of the city to whose underworld she once belonged, and from whose filthy profits she derives her income.  Good God!”

He sat forward and clutched his head, but Spaulding, who had drawn out his watch, tapped him on the shoulder.

“Come on,” he said.  “Time’s gettin’ short.  The stunt is to be pulled off just before supper.”